The goal of this research is to study high resolution image analysis of cervical cells for diagnostic assessment of patients. The discovery of the marker features for the presence of dysplasia or malignant disease expressed in "normal appearing" intermediate cells from the ectocervix has affected the very strategy of prescreening for cervical cancer. If confirmed on a large database of patients, the finding of frank tumor cells could be replaced by the statistical assessment of a limited sample of a patient's intermediate cells to ascertain whether visual review of the patient's sample is required. Complementing the analysis of marker features in cells coming from normal patients, patients with dysplasia, with carcinoma in situ, and with invasive cancer, a new technique has been developed to measure the ploidy of cells appearing in Papanicolaou smears and histological sections. It appears that the rapid availability of this new kind of information may add significant new, prognostic dimensions to the diagnostic techniques being developed. The statistical distribution of the DNA content in individual nuclei has been shown to be significantly correlated with the malignancy of tumors and the patient prognosis. The high-resolution technique for ploidy measurement is proven to be precise, accurate and fast. The results of this measurement are output as a histogram, accompanied by a series of statistical parameters. With the statistical significance of marker analysis well-established, and with the development of this new technique for ploidy measurement, the goal is now to investigate means for integrating this information into a report which is not only a more accurate diagnostic assessment of the patient, but one which may suggest prognoses and, possibly, courses of treatment.